“Snake?”
That was the most obscenely ambitious nickname I’d ever heard.
“Like the reptile. Yours?”
“Reggie.”
“That’s a dude’s name.”
“That’s a misogynistic assertion.”
“Fine.” He grinned, narrowing his eyes. “It’s unisex. And what do you mean, which do I prefer?”
“Being smart or being happy?”
A muffled voice echoed across the store. “Pickup for Regina Mason.”
“Regina?” Snake mocked. “What a prissy little name.”
“At least I’m not named after a slimy predator that sucks the life out of everyone it comes in contact with.” I pushed past him and snatched the folded bag from the pickup basket. I zipped the medication into my messenger bag and tossed exact change onto the counter.
“Leaving so soon?” Snake asked. Now that he was standing directly under the light, I could see the way his eyes were burrowed deep into his skull. How his full lips had a perfect model pout, like his whole mouth had gotten stuck on the kissy-face setting. His pretty face was too posh for his image.
“As fascinating as this conversation’s been, I’ve got to get home and eat dinner.”
“You should invite me over.”
“A dude named Snake with a pierced ear, a crap tattoo, and a fixation on violent screamo music? Yeah, not gonna happen.”
He shook his head as he ate another Twizzler. “Are you this mean to everyone you meet?”
“Only the special people,” I muttered.
As I was preparing to leave, he grabbed my arm. I was one security camera away from clocking him.
“I’ll see you around?” he asked, his tone strangely earnest.
I yanked my arm out of his grasp. Even though he was determined and forceful and weird, at least he wasn’t annoyingly exuberant. I had to give him brownie points for that.
“I’m not really around,” I said as I walked away.
My mother was waiting for me at the front doors with a bag in her hand. “I bought you anti-itch ointment just in case your fanny chafes again.” She smiled, proudly holding up a thin white tube. “And I picked you up a journal just in case you change your mind.”
“It better not have ducks.”
“Duck-free. Promise.”
She proceeded to babble on about birthday cards and half-price two-liters and a bunch of other irrelevant things I didn’t care about. We got in the minivan and rode away, listening to some girl group singing a ballad about the joy of the Lord.
Chapter Two
AT LUNCHTIME, I ATE OUTSIDE. Hawkesbury High had a closet-size cafeteria with round tables interspersed between microwave stations. Each table had been claimed from the first day. The table closest to the door was for the boys soccer team (see: assholes), who drank insane amounts of Gatorade and occasionally threw cheese at the table by the condiments rack. That table was reserved for the girls volleyball team (see: skanks in Spanx), who ducked flying cheese while whispering about the table near the exit door. That turf belonged to the cheerleaders (see: blonde brigade), and the one beside it to the drama club (see: future fast food employees of the world), and so on and so forth until every table was accounted for. If you didn’t care to sit with the teachers and be subjected to a million jokes you had to be stoned or drunk to find amusing, you sat outside at the picnic tables.
Polka, a Taiwanese exchange kid from my creative writing class, sat across from me. He ate sushi out of a Ziploc container and read a Japanese comic. I didn’t mind eating with him because he wasn’t in a clique, didn’t like to talk, and always brought a dessert he was willing to share.
On days when getting up in the morning felt like a feat, when the air was sticky and humid and the courtyard reeked of moldy cheese, I would let myself remember what it was like freshman year, devouring hamburgers in the cafeteria. What it was like to have a clique, even if it was only with one other person and nobody else knew we were there. But there was no purpose in dwelling on things like that.
Polka looked up from the book he was reading, a shiny one with a picture of a shark on the front, and slid a slice of birthday cake across the table. “You can have whole thing,” he said in his broken accent.
“You sure?”
“My guardian make it, but I don’t like coconut.”
I grabbed the fork and took a bite; the cake melted against my tongue. “This is great, Polka. You should eat it.”
He mechanically turned his head from side to side. It was funny whenever he shook his head like that, his eyes expressionless, mouth straight as a ruler. Polka never seemed to get up or down with his emotions. He might not have had any, and that was all the more reason to sit with him rather than inside, where everyone had an opinion on everything and most of them were totally stupid.
“My birthday yesterday,” he said as he resumed his reading. “I turn twenty-one.”
“You did not turn twenty-one, dude. You’re in the eleventh grade.”
He flipped the page. “Friend said I turned twenty-one. That’s how I take shots.”
“You drank shots?” I couldn’t see Polka, with his incurious eyes and khaki pants, downing shots with a group of friends. Really, I couldn’t see Polka having friends, but he did. He hung out with a few other guys from the exchange program. I couldn’t see them taking shots, either. “How’d they taste?”
“Taste like shit,” he said.
The way he cursed stuff was awesome. It was just small talk: “How are you?” “The weather’s great.” “Liquor shots taste like shit.” He would say it, I would go on eating his dessert, and that was the extent of our conversations. It always got left at shit, and that’s exactly where I wanted it.
He didn’t need to be friends beyond the picnic table, and neither did I.
Sometimes I was pathetic. Fine, all the time. But I liked to think I was pathetic in a way that was sort of inspiring, if there was any such brand of patheticism. Especially on the rare occasions I would go the park after school and sit on the swing set by myself.